Sawtooth National Recreation Area: The Wilderness That Almost Became a Mine

The Sawtooth National Recreation Area was established by Congress in nineteen seventy-two, not as a wilderness designation but as a specific land category created for a specific reason. The previous year, a mining company had proposed extracting molybdenum from a deposit in the White Cloud Peaks, a sub-range in the central Idaho mountains with some of the most dramatic granite spires in the lower forty-eight. The Idaho governor, Cecil Andrus, opposed the mine. The mining company had legal right to proceed under existing federal mining law.

Congress's solution was to create a new land category: national recreation area, which allowed the federal government to override mining claims through purchase while retaining more management flexibility than a wilderness designation. The NRA covers roughly seven hundred thirty thousand acres, including the Sawtooth Valley, the headwaters of the Salmon River, and the White Cloud Peaks.

Molybdenum is a steel-hardening metal used in making high-strength alloys for pipelines and construction equipment. The deposit in the White Clouds was real and economically significant by nineteen seventy standards. The decision to protect the landscape over the deposit was a policy choice, not an economic inevitability.

The Sawtooth Mountains themselves are a range of Precambrian granite and metamorphic rock that glaciation carved into the saw-blade profile visible from Highway Seventy-Five in the valley below. Over forty lakes sit in the cirques above tree line. The Salmon River begins as snowmelt in these cirques and runs more than four hundred miles to the Snake.

The NRA is administered within the broader Sawtooth National Forest.